The simplest example of a guide of prior art is a miter box, a three-faced construction with a bottom, and two sides vertical to the bottom and parallel to each other, said sides having opposing slots into which a cutting tool is inserted. A workpiece is placed on the bottom, between said sides and said slots, and held in place while the cutting tool is laid in said slots and used to make the cut. Each separate cut requires a measurement and moving the workpiece to the slots.
Controlling lengths of cut-off pieces is also achieved by fixed-blade tools, for example, vegetable cutters enable a workpiece to be advanced along a surface to impact the leading edge of a blade situated somewhat above the surface, leaving the cut-off piece to pass below the blade and the remaining workpiece to pass over. Repeating the operation in the same direction reduces the workpiece to a series of shorter pieces (“slices”). Multiple examples exist in the patent literature; U.S. Pat. No. 7,690,285 B2 is one such in a long list of generally similar design.
Other cutting guides, commercially available may be recognized as a set of “fingers”, with controlled spacing and general control of the width of the fingers themselves, such as a modified fork, or a modification of salad tongs. In the former case, the fork is inserted into a workpiece and the cutting tool, a knife, inserted between the tines, the handle and the workpiece can be used to slice through the workpiece, for example, a potato. The modified salad tongs are hinged devices in which both clasping portions have slots (whereas most salad tongs have a fork on one side and a spoon on the other); the handles are opened, then closed around a vegetable such as a tomato and cuts made by a knife wielded as for the simple fork just described. The disadvantage of simple fork lacks left-right control for the knife and pieces are easily cut into wedges or other irregular pieces, and knife thrust insertion is inconvenient. A disadvantage of the hinged clasping tool is that it has the same insertion requirement, a similar awkwardness to the vertical handle and adds the need to control both compression and angular motion during cutting. Regular slices are somewhat easier than with the simple fork, but the squeezing force can easily damage some of the slices as well as the remainder of the workpiece.
Each of the above means has specific limitations or disadvantages that afford opportunity for invention. For instance, the mitre-box design requires a separate movement of the work and measurement as noted above, and affords little advantage over simply cutting a vegetable on a cutting board in the usual way. The frame with blade implement has the advantage of simplicity in movement, but the thickness is a matter of some bother to adjust, any vegetable to be sliced is done one piece at a time, the blade is not sharpened so easily as a typical kitchen knife and multiple patents are known whose primary purpose is to reduce the safety issue of sliding a workpiece by hand into the sharp edge of a blade. The clasping implements have problems with crushing the vegetable to be cut, and are often limited to a single or a very small number of different fruits or vegetables and are not generally useful. The above described extended tine fork lacks left-right (yaw) control and slices can easily be wedges, instead of generally uniform slices.
The typical cutting implement includes a blade of some sort, and the Class for Cutting is 083, wherein are found a multitude of devices for mechanized cutting, and cross-references to manual cutters of the frame-with-blade type mentioned earlier. Class 30 covers Cutlery, and several implements are referenced first in that class, including a device described in Published U.S. App 2004/0016131 (Hayashi).
This latter implement consists of a series of parallel guide ribs curving from one edge of a generally circular base to an opposing point on the same base, the guide ribs serving to control a knife's movement through a vegetable to achieve uniform slices. In overview, it is recognizably an improvement on a mitre box, in which a series of slots allow a piece placed under the bowl-shaped guide to be cut uniformly. A disadvantage is that it does not handle irregular vegetables, indeed will not work with many different types of vegetables and is primarily a precision cutter of small dice-shaped pieces from single prepared segments of certain solid vegetables, such as potatoes.
Hayashi attempts to solve part of his stress-raiser problem, as well as the complementary blade-damage problem arising from the knife's impacting his support ring, by using a round cutting board that fits inside the guide's main support ring. The overall effect is of a cap of parallel guide segments placed over a board upon which has been placed a prepared vegetable piece to be further cut. Making multiple slices that leave such slices abutting each other and without relative movement, with an actual knife, as contemplated in the use of Hiyashi's unit, seems exceptionally tedious, further limiting the value for general use.
In light of the foregoing discussion, with their limitations, defects and disadvantages it remains valuable to overcome the defects noted and to provide a cutting guide enabling a plurality of cuts to be made in a broad range of workpieces, including multiple workpieces in a single manual operation, with improved restraint and stability of said workpieces, affording additional control of cut length and uniformity.
The objects, advantages and features of the present invention are readily apparent from the following description of the preferred embodiment(s) for carrying out the invention.